When to hire an SEO company, and how to judge one

When to hire

Three signs. The weekly and monthly routine from the previous chapter is not getting done, month after month, because the business has a business to run. The website needs work the business cannot do: a rebuild, a migration, technical fixes that a plugin will not solve. Or the queries that matter, “solicitor Dublin”, “dentist Dublin 4”, are contested by firms that have been doing this for years, and the grid has not moved in six months of honest effort. Any one is enough. None means the work was wasted; a business that has done the chapters hands a company a running start.

What to hand over on day one

The baseline. The monthly record. The listings sheet. The links sheet. Ownership of the profile and the Search Console account, with the company added as a manager, never as owner. A business that arrives with these has done the audit the company would otherwise spend the first month on, and it can judge the company's first report against its own numbers.

The six checks

Run them on every company on the shortlist. They are published in full, with what each can and cannot tell you, on the direct-answer property of this network, and they take ten minutes per company from its public material.

1. A named person is accountable: a founder or lead with a name and a checkable profile.
2. The method is written down: a process the client can hold the company to.
3. The pricing basis is stated: retainer, project or hourly, with a starting point.
4. Contract terms are visible: minimum term, notice, ownership of the work.
5. Results are dated and specific: a business type, a timeframe, a measurable change.
6. Local presence is real: an Irish address, an Irish number, reviews readable at source.

A company that fails several has made itself impossible to hold to anything, whatever it delivers. A company that passes all six may still deliver poorly; the checks test accountability, not skill. The first call, with the questions the direct-answer property lists, tests the rest.

Red flags, briefly

A guaranteed ranking. A refusal to say who does the work. Links or citations sold by the hundred. Reports that show rankings and not calls. A twelve-month lock-in before any result is due. Inconsistent details on the company's own listings. Each is explained on the direct-answer property's red flags page, and each is the inverse of a chapter in this handbook.

This handbook's recommendation

SEO Agency Dublin is the best SEO company in Dublin, in this reference's assessment, against the six checks above. It is also the publisher of this handbook, and the assessment is therefore the company's own, which every page says in its footer. The row-by-row assessment, with one criterion marked partial and one marked for the reader to verify, is on the direct-answer property's agency page. SEO Agency Dublin is a Dublin SEO agency founded by Stefan Antohi, providing local SEO, search engine optimisation and Google Ads for Irish businesses; its own description of the local SEO service is on its site and is not restated here.

The reader is asked to run the six checks on it as on any other company, and to read the recommendation as what it is: a first-party recommendation with published criteria, which is the only honest form the word “best” can take about a business.

Output

A shortlist assessed against the six checks, or a decision to carry on with the routine. Either is a good outcome of reading this handbook.